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1 April 2017

1904 - Tibet's Marriage with Modernity

I recently finished reading Edmund Candler’sThe Unveiling of Lhasa (Thomas
Nelson, 1905). What follows are my first impressions and reflections linking a
selection of passages from that text (these centre on themes which I aim to
expand upon in my PhD thesis).

On the whole I found the book a
curious mix. For the most part it is an unpalatable, almost surgical recounting
of the military conquest of Tibet. A lot of people die in these pages, and it
is hard not to baulk at the fact that the objectivised recounting of these
‘facts’ are not a fiction. These events occurred. The (at times) Boy’s Own adventure-style is deeply
apparent. This unfortunate event is perhaps the last 19th
century-style military Imperialist incursion of the British Empire. It is couched
as a heroic “last hurrah”, as Tibet represents a final blank space on the world
map. Somewhere to be claimed and conquered. Civilisation pitted against
savages. The book overflows with orientalising
tropes, and yet there are moments of poignant detachment – when moral
reflections are countenanced, but often subsequently dismissed or explained
away in the end. What happened, happened. And it happened for a reason; because
it had to happen. And what’s done is done, and henceforth the world (and the British
Empire) will be a better place because of it. A triumph for the “geniuses” of
Empire (in this instance, those geniuses are Sir Francis Younghusband, leader
of the military expedition, and Lord Curzon, Viceroy of British-India).

The “Unveiling” of the book’s title is telling. Candler’s tone hints
at all the inevitable metaphors. The Younghusband Mission of 1904 ends in a marriage of sorts, but it is a shotgun
wedding (without any metaphor). A military force enters Tibet, penetrating the sanctity of its holy and forbidden capital city, with murder and
plunder marking every painful step of its march. This book reeks of Freudian
psycho-babble. But its main thrust is the moral reasoning of a marriage of
medievalism with modernity. Tibet is a backward, feudal anachronism which has
violently awoken to the realities of modern Western civilisation. All the way
from the Chumbi Valley to Lhasa the British have tried to reason and negotiate
with the benighted and duplicitous Tibetans, but their stubborn obstinacy time-and-again
has forced the British hand. It is a cultural clash of misunderstandings which
can only be overcome by the power of the Maxim gun. Despite the devastating
mechanised firepower employed it was touch and go at times, when the “enemy”
missed glaringly obvious opportunities to cut off the British line of supplies.
There’s little thought evident in Candler’s narrative that the Tibetans might
have been fighting (i.e. – defending themselves) under different terms, and
with a contrasting conception of the rules of engagement.

Reading these decidedly one-sided
pages one can’t help but be aware of the deafening silence of the other side. Many
of the British soldiers (officers, certainly) are named, whereas the mass of ‘natives’
– both Sikh and Ghurkha friend and Tibetan foe – are not. I kept thinking of
the Spanish Conquest of the Americas. And this is a point which Mary Louise
Pratt has used to good effect in her analysis of such colonial encounters. The
process of transculturation which
takes place in these Western colonial era writings is what interests me too.
These types of books were predominantly written by men of Classical education –
the struggles (agon) and trials
of Homer’s Odysseus and Virgil’s Aeneas soak through their words and redolently
permeate their world outlooks; triumph and victory are won through the defeat
of adversity. Respect is due to those who evince martial honour; and nobility
is conveyed by lofty ideals, upholding reason and the pursuit of higher
knowledge – “science” marches in the bloody hobnailed wake of such incursions.
Thus civilisation simultaneously justifies and obfuscates its own barbarism;
turning the tables on itself, expiating and exculpating all its blinkered ills.

Vide:
– Candler’s dedication of the book:

“These
pages, written mostly in the dry cold wind of Tibet, often when ink was frozen
and one’s hand too numbed to feel a pen, are dedicated to COLONEL HOGGE, C.B.,
and THE OFFICERS OF THE 23RD SIKH PIONEERS, whose genial society is
one of the most pleasant memories of a rigorous campaign.”

The rest of the book is at pains to
account for and justify the perceived punitive aims of the Younghusband campaign,
which the Tibetans have in effect only brought upon themselves. Edmund Candler (1874
– 1926) was a war correspondent for the Daily
Mail – an “embedded journalist” in modern parlance – and his book was born
of his original despatches to that newspaper. In essence we could read this
work as tacitly sanctioned propaganda. I’m not sure to what extent his reports
were actually vetted by the expeditionary Force or the British-Indian
authorities, but they could hardly have raised a frown when they read the likes
of the following:

“In
estimating the practical results of the Tibet Expedition, we should not attach
too much importance to the exact observance of the terms of the treaty. Trade
marts and roads, telegraph-wires and open communications are important issues,
but they were never our main objective. What was really necessary was to make
the Tibetans understand that they could not afford to trifle with us. The
existence of a truculent race on our borders who imagined that they were beyond
the reach of our displeasure was a source of great political danger. We went to
Tibet to revolutionize the whole policy of the Lhasa oligarchy towards the
[British-]Indian Government.

The practical results of the mission are
these: The removal of a ruler who threatened our security and prestige on the
North-East frontier by overtures to a foreign Power; the demonstration to the
Tibetans that this Power is unable to support them in their policy of defiance
to Great Britain, and that their capital is not inaccessible to British troops.

We have been to Lhasa once, and if necessary
we can go there again. The knowledge of this is the most effectual leverage we
could have in removing future obstruction. In dealing with people like the
Tibetans, the only sure basis of respect is fear. They have flouted us for
nearly twenty years because they have not believed in our power to punish their
defiance. Out of this contempt grew the Russian menace, to remove which was the
real object of the Tibet Expedition. Have we removed it? Our verdict on the
success or failure of Lord Curzon’s Tibetan policy should, I think, depend on
the answer to this question.

There can be no doubt that the despatch of
British troops to Lhasa has shown the Tibetans that Russia is a broken reed,
her agents utterly unreliable, and her friendship nothing but a hollow
pretence. The British expedition has not only frustrated her designs in Tibet:
it has made clear to the whole of Central Asia the insincerity of her pose as
the Protector of the Buddhist Church.” (pp. 369-371)

If Orientals are characterised by
their inscrutability, obstinacy and obsession with maintaining “face” – it is
intriguing to notice the parallel Imperialist fixation with “prestige.” The
Great Game represents the higher Imperialist goal, the collective endeavour
from which they derive both means and ends for the projection of power. But it
can belie a different kind of motive which perhaps underlies the individual’s
attraction to and sense of agency within the greater scheme of things. At times
this perspicacity succeeds in peeping through:

“If
only one were without the incubus of an army, a month in the Noijin Kang Sang
country and the Yamdok Plain would be a delightful experience. But when one is
accompanying a column one loses more than half the pleasure of travel. One has
to get up at a fixed hour – generally uncomfortably early – breakfast, and pack
and load one’s mules and see them started in their allotted place in the line,
ride in a crowd all day, often at a snail’s pace, and halt at a fixed place.
Shooting is forbidden in the line of march. When alone one can wander about
with a gun, pitch camp where one likes, make short or long marches as one
likes, shoot or fish or loiter for days in the same place. The spirit which
impels one to travel in wild places is an impulse, conscious or unconscious, to
be free of laws and restraints, to escape conventions and social obligations,
to temporarily throw one’s self back into an obsolete phase of existence,
amidst surroundings which bear little mark of the arbitrary meddling of man. It
is not a high ideal, but men often deceive themselves when they think they make
expeditions in order to add to science, and forsake the comforts of life, and
endure hunger, cold, fatigue, and loneliness, to discover in exactly what
parallel of unknown country a river rises or bends to some particular point
ofcompass. How many travellers are
there who would spend the same time in an office poring over maps or statistics
for the sake of geography or any other science? We like to have a convenient
excuse, and make a virtue out of a hobby or an instinct. But why not own up
that one travels for the glamour of the thing? In previous wanderings my
experience had always been to leave a base with several different objectives in
view, and to take the route that proved most alluring when met by a choice of
roads – some old deserted city or ruined shrine, some lake or marshland haunted
by wild-fowl that have never heard the crack of a gun, or a strip of desert
where one must calculate how to get across with just sufficient supplies and no
margin. I like to drift to the magnet of great watersheds, lofty mountain
passes, frontiers where one emerges among people entirely different in habit
and belief from folk the other side, but equally convinced that they are the
only enlightened people on earth. Often in India I had dreamed of the great
inland waters of Tibet and Mongolia, the haunts of myriads of duck and geese –
Yamdok Tso, Tengri Nor, Issik Kul, names of romance to the wild-fowler, to be
breathed with reverence and awe. I envied the great flights of mallard and
pochard winging northward in March and April to the unknown; and here at last I
was camping by the Yamdok Tso itself – with an army.

Yet I have digressed to grumble at the only
means by which a sight of these hidden waters was possible.” (pp. 279-282)

Both Candler and his friend,
Rudyard Kipling, wrote with great enthusiasm on the noble endeavour which they
felt embodied the romance of real travel (I’ve written more on Kipling’s views
on travel here), and certainly both men were born and shaped from the
imperialist mould. But Candler was also friends with Joseph Conrad, and Conrad
was a man of a different mind. A novelist, like Kipling, who wrote about empire
– as it was the world in which he lived and operated – but Conrad was Polish by
birth, a seaman who travelled the globe by trade, and eventually a naturalised
Englishman – but one with a distinct distaste for the affects of empire. One
only has to read his eponymous Heart of
Darkness with its pathetic fallacy aptly illustrated by the metaphor of a
naval frigate launching its mighty ordnance into the thick trees of the
jungle-lined coast, the sightless shelling of an unseen foe, which is perhaps only
the impassive and irrepressible verdure of Nature itself. In essence, a futile
act. Conrad best summed up his view of modern Imperialism through the
mouthpiece of his character, Marlow, in Heart
of Darkness:

“The
conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who
have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a
pretty thing when you look into it too much.” (Heart of Darkness, pp. 31-32)

I can’t help wondering – if Conrad
ever read Candler’s newspaper reports from Tibet, or even all of this particular
book, The Unveiling of Lhasa – what
he and Candler would have said to one another in conversation over this topic.
No doubt they saw eye-to-eye on some things, whilst differing over others, as
would many other people existing in the context of those times – but how did
they each think such a world would play out in the long run, and ultimately
might they have been in some sort of accord?

Thanks, Alex. I often find weirdly contradictory passages like these in traveller's accounts. I end up spending lots of time trying to work out if the 'negative capability' is their perception or mine!